The Baltimore Ravens opened their season with two road games wedging a tough home opener loss to a frisky New Orleans Saints team that’s battled three straight games. Baltimore has lost three centers, had a laundry list of injuries in their wide receiver room, and been attempting to work key players back from long-term injuries. Times haven’t been easy amidst a new, somewhat inexperienced coaching staff. This isn’t new. While there are new faces, many have remained. Scar tissue has accumulated. Times have been hard, to the Ravens lofty standards. Kyle Hamilton spoke to their defensive standards as an organization and their failure to reach them, quite frankly. He’s spoken about this consistently, in fact.
Following an up and down defensive performance Sunday, he reiterated the sentiment.
“It is unacceptable to be saying we are a ‘Ravens defense’ or whatever that means at this point and be going out there and doing that. Obviously, we have a new staff in, so it is on the players. We have to get it fixed as players and do right by these guys to put us in better positions.”
How long do things need to be hard for the Ravens defense? Probably not much longer, considering their upcoming opponents/quarterback matchups are:
Titans/Cam Ward
Falcons/Michael Penix
Browns/Deshaun Watson
In the immediate, the Falcons and Browns had admirable performances. However, they pale in comparison to Joe Burrow and Josh Allen leading the Bengals and Bills offenses respectively. Dak Prescott, regardless of #narratives, is an elite level NFL quarterback. He was able to sustain drives, beat them pre-snap and see through their pressure packages. He gave them a hard time. Hard times make hard men. The Ravens should throw the kitchen sink at Cam Ward defensively this Sunday. They should attempt to schematically challenge him with a bevy of coverage rotations post snap, overload pressures, man coverage and personnel packages. Their gameplan should be aggression.
They should parlay that aggression into their matchups against the inexperienced Michael Penix, before ramping back into more opponent specific game planning for Deshaun Watson. That’s how they can prevent soft times from creating soft men, thus a soft defense, before their marquee matchups a month out.
Last season, the Ravens bought into fool’s gold. After getting lambasted by the Bills, Lions, Chiefs and Texans to start last season, Baltimore played a soft schedule of quarterbacks and offenses. Their defense licked their wounds and mostly beat up on poor/inexperienced quarterbacks aside from an impressive shutout of Joe Burrow. Drake Maye and the Patriots gave the Ravens a quick reminder amidst a great win streak that they were not those guys, pal. Ultimately,
